I am a sucker for mechs, you put a mech in your game, then I am definitely going to look at it with interest.
SYNDUALITY has mechs, it has customisable mechs, with big guns. “What’s not to love?” I hear my imaginary audience ask, an audience that knows I like all those things, and that also likes all these things so that the semi-rhetorical question makes contextual sense.
Well.
SYNDUALITY starts off pretty good. Society has fallen apart because of rain. People had to flee underground to avoid being melted by it (climate change is no joke) and resort to scavenging the surface. This is where the player comes in. They are in the process of rebuilding their subterranean lair and have a mech to help them go to the surface to complete assignments for an unseen corporation and collect resources.
You start off by picking an Anime AI avatar and what special they can do, and then loading up a mech with supplies and then going out on ‘Sorties’. The game is played in third-person perspective on a large open world area, waiting to be explored.
The main threats are mutated enemies that litter the map, renegade bandits that have their own mechs, and the rain. The first two do more conventional damage to a health meter, but there is also an environmental protection meter that depletes if the mech is exposed to rain. If either of these are depleted to zero then the player has to eject from their mech, losing any uninsured gear in the process.
Each Sortie spawns the player in a different area, and they can then scan for resources and shoot enemies. Objectives are fed to the player that guide them towards points of interest. It drip feeds information slowly and guides them through crafting, rebuilding sections of the base, and upgrading gear.
The controls are pretty solid, except for triggering the special abilities, the combination of holding down the trigger and pointing to the skill is fussy and unresponsive. It gets in the way because these are some of the two critical commands in the game.
Otherwise, this is a game that works in fits and starts, there are wait times for things to build in which you are expected to play more of the game (or come back later), there is a battle pass, co-op missions, and other things that slowly rotate into view the more you play. None of it is bad, but none of it is inspiring.
This means that there is a little voice in my head going ‘you are expected to pay a lot of money for this game, and it has all the same baubles as a free-to-play title’. It is impossible to dismiss that feeling too.
It is hard to be enthusiastic about a game that expects me to pay full price, then immediately pay more money to unlock stuff. There is a nakedness to that expectation that made me enjoy SYNDUALITY a lot less.
Conclusion
SYNDUALITY has plenty of solid ideas, they just aren’t particularly original, and they are asking full price for a bunch of content that is weighted down by the kind of exploitation you see in Free-to-Play.
This game was reviewed based on Xbox S|X review code, using an Xbox S|X console. All of the opinions and insights here are subject to that version. Game provided by publisher.
